


Times Have Changed & Times Are Strange

by samalander



Category: Letterkenny (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Homecoming, Siblings, Small Towns, alphabet cold open
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:42:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21841618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samalander/pseuds/samalander
Summary: Katy and her kingdom; a character study.
Comments: 14
Kudos: 75
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Times Have Changed & Times Are Strange

**Author's Note:**

  * For [resolute](https://archiveofourown.org/users/resolute/gifts).



> _Times have changed and times are strange_  
>  _Here I come, but I ain't the same_  
>  _Mama, I'm coming home_ -Ozzy Osbourne, "Momma I'm Coming Home"
> 
> Happy Yuletide, Resolute!
> 
> Special thanks to Snows & Skan, my very own small town girls.

Alright, already.  
Before being blue, be brainy. Big Brother begs, but blood begets bitterness if baby bears a big burden.  
Can't cut Canada from the conversation, California comes calling.  
Don't distress. Directing dumb dudes doesn't demand diligence.  
Even not earning enough, eventually, everyone escapes the estate.  
Finally, freedom! For finding function, farms are full of fighting, face a fraught fate.  
Go. Get a good gander, gambol gladly and gradually get gratification.  
However,  
If introspection is impossible, instead inspect independent items.  
Just judge judiciously, jail is a jam and a jinx.  
Keep keen, knotty kin knowingly kvetch and kick off-kilter.  
Later, lie lovingly long and laconic. Let lords and ladies lament. Languish in love. Lay low. Last look, last laugh, live life.  
Maybe make more moves, meditate on misadventures, mull over mishaps.  
No nonsense.  
Observe obscenity, over and over. Once overjoyed, own the outcome.  
Perhaps the place people perch presents a pass.  
Quite a quagmire. Qualify quietly and quickly.  
Remit regret, no rejoinders. Rely on a relative, relegate relationships of remorse to the refuse.  
Sit and stay silent, see some secrets. Strive to shift self to a sharpened state.  
Try to take the time to talk. Tell the tribe they triumph in tenacity.  
Understand an utterly unwilling universe.  
Vie for violence, a volatile venue is a valid vacation.  
Wager on Wayne. Without wavering.  
X-ceptional X-citement. X-actly.  
You yearn, you yield, you take yoga.  
Zenith of the zero-sum game. Zestful, not zombied. A zig-zag zone. Zero regret.

* * *

Katy is sixteen the first time anyone suggests she should leave Letterkenny.

It’s not like she particularly wants to — why would she? She has a great setup here. But it seems like it's what people expect of her.

And of all the people in the world, it's Wayne who brings it up. Wayne who flat-out loves Letterkenny, who could grow up to be mayor if he wanted to.

“So, Katy,” he says, one night when they’re sitting on the porch, their dad having lovingly drank himself to sleep inside. “Katy, so. What’re ya gonna do when you graduate?”

Katy hasn’t thought much about it. She’s going to graduate high school because of course she will, it’s the Thing You Do. But she’s not college material. No one in Letterkenny goes to college and she's not so special that she needs to.

“Stay here,” she says. “Help you with chorin’. Take care of the dogs.”

“‘S that all?” Wayne says, staring off into the middle distance. “All you want to do?”

This is silly. If Wayne has something to say to her, he can say it. 

“This is silly,” she says. “What’re ya trying to say?”

Wayne shrugs. “You could go to America.”

“Oh,” Katy rolls her eyes. People talk about America like it's a place a sane person would live. America doesn't have any call for her, no real appeal. “And what’s in America?”

Her brother takes a sip of his drink— it’s probably beer, she knows, but he’s old enough and as long as he doesn’t overdo it too much too often, she’s not about to start telling him how to run his affairs.

“Lotsa things,” Wayne says. “Hamburger the size of your dang head.”

“Don’t need a head-sized hamburger,” Katy shrugs. “I got friends here, I got family. I don’t know what else I’d need.”

She stretches out under the stars. It’s a nice spring night. She should get a lawn chair out here, something to really relax on. That’d be nice.

Wayne makes a noise that Katy knows is him quitting. He’s not the one to try and convince her to do a thing she doesn’t want to do. 

There are so many stars in Letterkenny, she thinks, watching the sky as she sits with her brother in the still night. Probably more stars than there are in America, with all their light and their obesity and their expensive healthcare. And their movies. Katy does like American movies, especially the older ones, with the ladies who knew what they wanted.

Katy knows what she wants, she thinks. She has enough. She doesn’t need to be Lauren Bacall or Katherine Hepburn or even Doris Day. She can be Katy, and it’s enough.

* * *

When she's a little older, closer to twenty, Katy knows that Letterkenny is her town.

Not like, it's the place that she lives, or the only place she really knows. But like, she knows it from the inside out. She is this town, and it is her. Some of her friends have left, sure. People leave all the time. But leaving isn't what Katy needs.

What Katy needs is sour candy, and long days by the produce stand, and love, and Puppers. 

And she has those things, right here in the same town where her grandpa took the old schoolhouse and made a home that she still lives in. 

She has candy and Wayne and Darry and Dan. She has the boys on the Irish, the boys in the skids, even some of the boys from the Rez come to see her from time to time. She has plenty of pretty people to make out with, and more if she wants it.

She runs the place, for the most part.

She's not Bonnie McMurray, sure. People don't drop their jaws when Katy walks in. But they do what she says. And in some ways that's better.

Until one day it isn't. 

One day she's bored, and restless, and driving to Quebec doesn't seem like far enough. She wants something different; like when you drink too many beers over too many days and just want some whiskey. It's not that Letterkenny isn't enough. It is, and it always will be. But she wants to try, just once, living outside of the fifteen square kilometres where she's spent most of her life.

She doesn't want to stay away; that was never the plan. But she wants to try on someone else's shoes for a little while and see how far she can walk.

She signs the modeling contract because it's something she _wants to_ do, and she leaves Letterkenny because it's something she _can_ do.

* * *

Katy doesn't hate cities. She's fine with them. It's like hating trees or air. Cities are there, they can't be hated for being what they are.

So she fits in, sorta.

She's in a model's apartment-- about 50 square metres with five girls on top of each other and one bathroom. Three of them are named Ashley. It's like being a sardine, like being in sandwiched between Reilley and Jonesy without even the courtesy of an orgasm to make it less claustrophobic.

That's really the miserable part, to be fair, the mass of bodies and hair products and clothing that she has to somehow slot herself between.

She misses space.

And modeling is boring. A slab of meat could do it. You could put a bikini on a dead fish and it would have about as much to do at a photoshoot as she does. It's all turn and smile, don't smile, suck in your stomach, chin down, a little to the left. She might as well be remote controlled, for all the input she has.

She does get to shoot one cool photo, where she's wearing actual designer clothing and there are two boys as her props- Shep and Kingsley. They're not bad looking. She decides to fuck them, just to finally get that orgasm she feels she's owed, and they attach themselves like lampreys. They need petting and preening and being told that they're not fat more than most girls she's met.

She tries a spat of toe-curling with one of the Ashleys, but it turns out she's a dead weight in bed, and Katy doesn't need a round two to know that she wants to go home.

The apartment is too loud and too bright and too full. There's no space for a body to breathe. The buildings loom over her like menacing giants. There's no good sledding, and no good hockey, and no people who appreciates her for the her she is.

She lasts the summer, and she comes home.

* * *

Wayne doesn't say much when she comes home; he doesn't like that she brought Shep and Kingsley with her, but Katy doesn't need to explain herself. She brought them because she wants them, and because this is her house, too. Left to her just the same as it was left to him.

Though she kinda can't stand them and their body issues.

"Why're ya really home?" Wayne asks, when they come back from finding the shed trashed. Kingsley and Shep are upstairs, probably staring into a mirror and talking about Don Fattingly and Fat LaFontaine, but Katy is in the kitchen with her brother for the first time in months.

"You don't want me here?" she asks, helping herself to a Puppers and getting one for him.

Wayne takes the beer with a nod. "'Course I do," he says. "But you had a thing."

She shrugs. "I said before. Boring, no money. I wanted to come home."

"You could do a lot of great things," Wayne tells her. "If you wanted to."

Katy takes a drink. "Nah, I do things here."

Wayne looks at her for a long moment, like he's trying to figure her out. She's never seen her brother need to figure her out before, but here he is. Here they are.

"Like what?"

She smiles and finally takes her seat at the table. "Like taking care of you idiots."

"You're not mom," Wayne says.

"Thank god," she replies, taking another drink.

"10-4," he agrees, incling the mouth of his bottle towards her. "Only needed one of those in this world."

Katy smiles at him, half enjoying the mood he's in; a little morose and a little talkative, at least for Wayne. "One might have been too many."

They both take a draught of their drinks, letting the moment marinate. Katy's sure Wayne is thinking of their mom, of the birthdays they never had and the work they did. But she's thinking about the stars outside, about her lawn chair and the produce stand.

"I'm glad you tried," he says, finally. "You glad you tried?"

"Yeah," Katy smiles. "I think I am. But I'm also glad I'm back."

"'S good to have you back," he agrees, stretching so his neck cracks.

It's weird, she thinks. He was always the one who thought she should try something, and now he's the one who's glad she's home. "I thought you wanted me to go great things," she says.

Wayne shrugs. "I wanted you to try. You know me, I like it here. I got the Ag Hall and the boys and a good dust-up if I need one. Got a girl and a farm and good dogs. Town could use a bar--"

"Town _needs_ a bar," Katy interrupts, feeling the rhythm of her brother, the rocking nature of Letterkenny lulling her home and back into its embrace.

"But I got what I need. And you should have what you need, too."

Katy thinks about it, staring at a spot on the wall while she thinks about what she _needs_.

Kingsly and Shep won't stay long, in a month or so they'll be back to the city to find some new snipes, to go back to modeling and earning no money. They think it's challenging. They like it _there_.

But they were never going to be here forever. She doesn't want them forever. And she doesn't need the city. She doesn't need to model or be seen.

"You ever drive down Highway 11," Katy says, finally looking at her brother. "And think about how it goes from coast to coast? And how you could just-- stay on it. Just drive across Canada and see the ocean, if you wanted to?"

"Can't say I have," Wayne shrugs, finishing off his beer. "You do?"

"Sometimes," Katy says. "It's like the Wizard of Oz. I wanted to know what's over the rainbow. Not cause I wanted to stay there, but just because I wanted to see."

"The bear goes over the mountain," Wayne says, standing to get himself another beer. 

"He sure as shit did, " Katy nods. "And he saw more fucking mountains. I guess-- I guess I don't mind seeing mountains on the other side of mountains. I'd rather see the mountains Uncle Eddie saw then any other mountains out there."

"They're good mountains," Wayne says, sitting back down and gracing her with one of his rare half-smiles.

"They are," Katy says, finishing her beer herself and standing up. "They're the mountains I wanna look at. For now."

Wayne nods at her, raising his beer again. "Mountains," he says, like it's a toast.

"I should go rescue Podger Moore and Hans Grubber from the mirror," she says. "Before they decide to go on an air fast."

"What the fuck is an air fast?" Wayne asks, raising his eyebrow all the way to his goddamn hairline.

Katy laughs and shugs. "Good night, big brother."

"Night," he says. "Glad you're home."

Katy is glad she's home, too, but she doesn't feel the need to tell him that.


End file.
